weaknesses and foibles, or endeavour to demonstrate that Africans are endowed with
either greater virtues or lesser vices that the rest of mankind. There is undoubtedly
considerable evidence of much that is noble and glorious in our African past; there is no
need to gild the Lily nor to try to hide that which is ignoble. But here again it is a question
of whose standards and values you are applying in assessing something as noble or
ignoble, and I maintain that the Encyclopaedia Africana must reject non-African value-
judgments of things African.
It is true that despite the great advances made during the last twenty years in the various
disciplines of African studies, so much of Africa's history has yet to be unearthed,
scientifically analysed, and fully comprehended. This sometimes gives rise to the question
whether enough is yet known to undertake at this time the compilation of an encyclopaedia
of the sort envisaged. Those who entertain such hesitation and doubt only expose the
extent of their ignorance about Africa's great past.
Before the colonial era in Africa, Europeans had had many encounters with Africans on the
cross-roads of history. They had married into African royal families, received Africans into
their courts as ambassadors and social equals, and their writers had depicted African
characters as great heroes in their literature. In common with the rest of mankind Africans
made extensive use of cereals, they learnt the art of raising cattle, adapted metal tools and
weapons to their own use, and, to quote Basil Davidson, "undertook mining and smelting
and forging on a continental scale, borrowed crops from other lands, introduced soil
conservation, discovered the medicinal value of a host of herbs and plants, and worked
out their own explanations of mankind and the universe.
All this had happened before the first ships set forth from Europe."
Let me give another quotation even at the risk of boring you, this time from Leo Frobenius
again, a well-known historian who made 17 expeditions into Africa, North, East, West and
South, in order to learn at first hand of the culture of the African peoples. Frobenius makes
a basic statement in his book African Civilisation, which unfortunately has not yet been
translated into English. Doubtless, there is reason why no complete translation has yet
been made. From a limited translation made by Anna Malise Graves, I quote: "When they,
European navigators, arrived in the Gulf of Guinea and landed at Ouidah in Dahomey, the
captains were greatly astonished to find streets well laid out, bordered on either side for
several leagues with two rows of trees, and men clad in richly coloured garments of their
own weaving. Further south in the kingdom of the Congo, a swarming crowd dressed in
silk and velvet, great states well ordered and down to the most minute details, powerful
rulers, flourishing industries, civilised to the manner of their bones. And the condition of the
countries on the eastern coast, Mozambique, for instance, was quite the same. The
revelations of the navigators from 15th to the 17th century gave incontrovertible proofs that
Africa stretching south from the edge of the Sahara desert was still in full flower - the
flower of harmonious and well-ordered civilisations. And this fine flowering the European
conquistadors or conquerors annihilated as far as they penetrated into the country."
Indeed, the history of Africa goes back into the dim recesses of time and antiquity. There
are even scientists in our time who are beginning to claim that Africa was the very cradle of
mankind. The fossil remains of man discovered by Dr. L.S.B. Leakey in Tanganyika have
been dated by scientific processes as one and three-quarter million (1,750,000) years old.
From the head waters of the Nile in Tanganyika let us move swiftly to its mouth on the
Mediterranean Sea and the Isthmus of Suez where the great civilization of Egypt was
fostered for thousands of years down to the Christian era. There, as we all know, man rose
to the phenomenal heights of statecraft, science and religion and the excellence of the
arts. Evidence from language, religion, astronomy, folklore and divine kinship, as well as
geographical and physical proximity, confirms the basic African origin of this Egyptian